Intel’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan seems ready to get right to work to turn around the struggling company. The semiconductor giant’s new executive is considering sweeping changes for the company’s chip manufacturing and AI strategies, according to Reuters, including cutting middle management staff and revamping the company’s approach to manufacturing chips. Tan reportedly told company […]
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It’s gloves off in one of the more tense rivalries in the world of startups. HR company Rippling Monday morning announced a lawsuit against Deel, another big player in the same space. The dramatic 50-page complaint alleges racketeering, misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference, unfair competition, and aiding and abetting a breach of fiduciary duty. […]
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The world is bad sometimes, but it feels even worse if you can’t stop staring into the all-consuming abyss that is the 6-inch screen of a smartphone, following you through space and time. It taunts you with its compact, light build that’s small enough to slip into your pocket and take anywhere, and its siren […]
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This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Is Google playing catchup on search with OpenAI?
—Mat Honan
I’ve been mulling over something that Will Heaven, our senior editor for AI, pointed out not too long ago: all the big players in AI seem to be moving in the same directions and converging on the same things. Agents. Deep research. Lightweight versions of models. Etc.
Google is no different. It’s just announced it’s adding new AI features from Gemini to search, and adding search features to Gemini.
What strikes me more than how well they work is that they are really just about catching up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. And their belated appearance in March of the year 2025 doesn’t seem like a great sign for Google. Read the full story.
This story originally appeared in The Debrief with Mat Honan, a weekly newsletter about the biggest stories in tech from our editor in chief. Sign up here to get the next one in your inbox on Friday.
If you’re interested in reading more about AI search, check out the following stories:
+ Generative AI search was one of MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2025. Read more about why it made the cut for this year’s list. + AI means the end of internet search as we’ve known it. Despite fewer clicks, copyright fights, and sometimes iffy answers, AI could unlock new ways to summon all the world’s knowledge.
+ AI search could break the web. Developers should act before governments fall back on blunt tools. Read the full story.
+ Why Google’s AI Overviews gets things wrong. The feature provides brief, AI-generated summaries highlighting key information and links on top of search results. Unfortunately, it’s also unreliable.
+ Why you shouldn’t trust AI search engines. Read the full story.
AI chatbots have joined the chat
Chatbots are changing how we connect to each other and ourselves. But are these changes for the better, and how should they be monitored and regulated?
To learn more, join me for a live Roundtable session this Thursday at 12pm ET. I’ll be chatting with MIT Technology Review editor Rachel Courtland and senior reporter Eileen Guo, and we’ll be unpacking the landscape around chatbots. Register to ensure you don’t miss out!
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 How Trump’s foreign aid cuts will hurt millions of peoples’ health
The world is going to struggle to cope with the loss of US support. (Vox)
+ Hundreds of thousands of people are likely to lose their lives as a result. (New Yorker $)
+ The cuts could cause tuberculosis to become untreatable again. (The Atlantic $)
+ Top scientific universities are being forced to slash jobs. (The Guardian)
+ Pregnant women may die because of cuts to reproductive care. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Left-leaning Americans are abandoning Tesla
And conservatives face an uphill climb to plug the sales gap. (NYT $)
+ The company is turning its back on the typically pro-EV buyers that made it a success. (WP $)
3 VC firms are rushing to invest in Israeli startups
They’re betting that the firms are likely to do future business with the US. (WSJ $)
+ Here’s the defense tech at the center of US aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. (MIT Technology Review)
4 NASA is scheduled to return the two stranded astronauts on Tuesday
A new crew arrived to relieve them of their duties over the weekend. (NPR)
+ Let’s see if they make it home this week or not. (Ars Technica)
+ Space travel is seriously hard on the human body. (WP $)
5 Baidu’s new reasoning AI model is designed to challenge DeepSeek
It claims Ernie X1 offers the same performance at half the price. (Insider $)
+ DeepSeek’s shock success is sparking a new wave of AI investment. (Bloomberg $)
+ Four Chinese AI startups to watch beyond DeepSeek. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Alphabet has big plans for its laser-based internet project
Taara has been spun out of its moonshot incubator and into the real world. (FT $)
+ It’s a rival to Musk’s Starlink network. (The Verge)
7 What if Bitcoin’s mysterious creator is just a loser?
As the trail grows older, all signs point towards the shadowy figure being… a bit of a jerk. (NY Mag $)
8 Drone shows are bringing 3D artists’ ideas to life
The only problem is, they come with a safety warning. (Rest of World)
9 Google’s new Gemini AI model can remove watermarks from images
Naughty, naughty. (TechCrunch)
+ It’s easy to tamper with watermarks from AI-generated text. (MIT Technology Review)
10 What is vibe coding, exactly?
Developers are giving in and letting AI dictate its own path. (The Information $)
Quote of the day
“To a lot of people, putting Elon Musk in charge of protecting the middle class is like putting Jeffrey Dahmer in charge of protecting a morgue.”
—Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist, explains why Elon Musk’s unpopular actions are likely to become a problem for the Trump administration, the Guardian reports.
The big story
How covid conspiracies led to an alarming resurgence in AIDS denialism
August 2024
Several million people were listening in February when Joe Rogan falsely declared that “party drugs” were an “important factor in AIDS.” His guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, the former evolutionary biology professor turned contrarian podcaster Bret Weinstein, agreed with him.
Speaking to the biggest podcast audience in the world, the two men were promoting dangerous and false ideas—ideas that were in fact debunked and thoroughly disproved decades ago.
These comments and others like them add up to a small but unmistakable resurgence in AIDS denialism—a false collection of theories arguing either that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS or that there’s no such thing as HIV at all.
These claims had largely fallen out of favor until the coronavirus arrived. But, following the pandemic, a renewed suspicion of public health figures and agencies is giving new life to ideas that had long ago been pushed to the margins. Read the full story.
—Anna Merlan
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ Happy St Patrick’s Day, if you’re celebrating today!
+ This newsreader losing it over the name of an inspirational pig is the most entertaining thing you’ll see today 
+ These one-pot pasta dishes are exactly the kind of low-maintenance recipes you need for a weekday dinner.
+ Do you snerdle? Me neither.
This story originally appeared in The Debrief with Mat Honan, a weekly newsletter about the biggest stories in tech from our editor in chief. Sign up here to get the next one in your inbox.
I’ve been mulling over something that Will Heaven, our senior editor for AI, pointed out not too long ago: that all the big players in AI seem to be moving in the same directions and converging on the same things. Agents. Deep research. Lightweight versions of models. Etc.
Some of this makes sense in that they’re seeing similar things and trying to solve similar problems. But when I talked to Will about this, he said, “it almost feels like a lack of imagination, right?” Yeah. It does.
What got me thinking about this, again, was a pair of announcements from Google over the past couple of weeks, both related to the ways search is converging with AI language models, something I’ve spent a lot of time reporting on over the past year. Google took direct aim at this intersection by adding new AI features from Gemini to search, and also by adding search features to Gemini. In using both, what struck me more than how well they work is that they are really just about catching up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. And their belated appearance in March of the year 2025 doesn’t seem like a great sign for Google.
Take AI Mode, which it announced March 5. It’s cool. It works well. But it’s pretty much a follow-along of what OpenAI was already doing. (Also, don’t be confused by the name. Google already had something called AI Overviews in search, but AI Mode is different and deeper.) As the company explained in a blog post, “This new Search mode expands what AI Overviews can do with more advanced reasoning, thinking and multimodal capabilities so you can get help with even your toughest questions.”
Rather than a brief overview with links out, the AI will dig in and offer more robust answers. You can ask followup questions too, something AI Overviews doesn’t support. It feels like quite a natural evolution—so much so that it’s curious why this is not already widely available. For now, it’s limited to people with paid accounts, and even then only via the experimental sandbox of Search Labs. But more to the point, why wasn’t it available, say, last summer?
The second change is that it added search history to its Gemini chatbot, and promises even more personalization is on the way. On this one, Google says “personalization allows Gemini to connect with your Google apps and services, starting with Search, to provide responses that are uniquely insightful and directly address your needs.”
Much of what these new features are doing, especially AI Mode’s ability to ask followup questions and go deep, feels like hitting feature parity with what ChatGPT has been doing for months. It’s also been compared to Perplexity, another generative AI search engine startup.
What neither feature feels like is something fresh and new. Neither feels innovative. ChatGPT has long been building user histories and using the information it has to deliver results. While Gemini could also remember things about you, it’s a little bit shocking to me that Google has taken this long to bring in signals from its other products. Obviously there are privacy concerns to field, but this is an opt-in product we’re talking about.
The other thing is that, at least as I’ve found so far, ChatGPT is just better at this stuff. Here’s a small example. I tried asking both: “What do you know about me?” ChatGPT replied with a really insightful, even thoughtful, profile based on my interactions with it. These aren’t just the things I’ve explicitly told it to remember about me, either. Much of it comes from the context of various prompts I’ve fed it. It’s figured out what kind of music I like. It knows little details about my taste in films. (“You don’t particularly enjoy slasher films in general.”) Some of it is just sort of oddly delightful. For example: “You built a small shed for trash cans with a hinged wooden roof and needed a solution to hold it open.”
Google, despite having literal decades of my email, search, and browsing history, a copy of every digital photo I’ve ever taken, and more darkly terrifying insight into the depths of who I really am than I probably I do myself, mostly spat back the kind of profile an advertiser would want, versus a person hoping for useful tailored results. (“You enjoy comedy, music, podcasts, and are interested in both current and classic media”)
I enjoy music, you say? Remarkable!
I’m also reminded of something an OpenAI executive said to me late last year, as the company was preparing to roll out search. It has more freedom to innovate precisely because it doesn’t have the massive legacy business that Google does. Yes, it’s burning money while Google mints it. But OpenAI has the luxury of being able to experiment (at least until the capital runs out) without worrying about killing a cash cow like Google has with traditional search.
Of course, it’s clear that Google and its parent company Alphabet can innovate in many areas—see Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics announcement this week, for example. Or ride in a Waymo! But can it do so around its core products and business? It’s not the only big legacy tech company with this problem. Microsoft’s AI strategy to date has largely been reliant on its partnership with OpenAI. And Apple, meanwhile, seems completely lost in the wilderness, as this scathing takedown from longtime Apple pundit John Gruber lays bare.
Google has billions of users and piles of cash. It can leverage its existing base in ways OpenAI or Anthropic (which Google also owns a good chunk of) or Perplexity just aren’t capable of. But I’m also pretty convinced that unless it can be the market leader here, rather than a follower, it points to some painful days ahead. But hey, Astra is coming. Let’s see what happens.
X users will soon be able to generate AI videos in-stream.
It seems that “longer short” videos are now gaining more traction.
After months of speculation, the U.S. government says that TikTok will be sold to an American partner.
The newsletter will provide video usage insights and updates.
But will Snapchat’s AR glasses be able to compete with offerings from competitors?